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Join us for a reading from The Barbarous Century, a new collection from poet Leah Umansky, with Beth Duffordand Ben Purkert.

"When we talk about books of poetry being generous, we’re talking about collections like Leah Umansky’s The Barbarous Century. Here are poems that lay out everything they’ve got. Poems that call forth a cast of voices ranging from W.B. Yeats to Daenerys Targaryen to Azar Nafisi to Emily Dickinson to Don Draper. Poems that “spuddle” towards romance, that cherish “the bristle and the fat,” that invite in “another delicate storm of possible.” What fullness, what symphony, what verve Umansky has conjured here! The Barbarous Century is a wild, magnificent achievement."
- Kaveh Akbar

Leah Umansky is the author of The Barbarous Century (Eyewear 2018), among others. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as POETRY, Guernica, The New York Times, Pleiades, Salamander, and the anthologies, The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books) and Misrepresented Peoples (NYQ Books). She is #teamkhaleesi & #teambernard.

Beth Dufford lives, works, and writes in New York City. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, The Little Magazine, and Rise Up Review, and is forthcoming in Common Ground Review. Her chapbook, Microscopic Peaceful Implosions, was published in May 2018 by Eyewear Publishing.

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New York Times Magazine, The Rumpus, upstreet, Southeast Review, and Broadsided. He is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literary Arts at Hampshire College.

Ben Purkert is the author of For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books, 2018). His poems, essays, and book reviews appear in The New Yorker, Tin House Online, AGNI, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A former New York Times Fellow at NYU, he currently teaches at Rutgers. He is also the editor of Back Draft for Guernica.

Event date:

Thursday, September 27, 2018 - 7:00pm

Event address:

52 Prince Street

New York, NY10012

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Our Book Clubs

INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE:Led by Sarah McNally, our next book club takes place on Monday, February 4th, at 7 p.m.(Prince Street).We will discuss Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandel.